![]() In certain ways, Henry James was like the Seinfeld of his time. The narration is mostly clear, but the pacing is stilted, the female voices are weak, and editing left in several mistakes/repeats. I found this interesting and was glad I read it, but would not read it again, nor recommend it to most readers. It felt as if this book were written for the author, as self-therapy, without much consideration of other readers. Post-Me-Generation readers may have trouble bonding with the protagonist's challenge of finding himself in Paris. The characters' dialog is a bit abstracted, as if in (a very long) play. Yet, it was quite difficult for me to immerse myself in the characters or story. ![]() The writing is narrated from the protagonists point-of-view, and we see him slowly change. The main character is an American small town fellow sent to Paris to retrieve a wayward younger man, and instead discovers the limits of his own experience and comes to question his conventional wisdom. I don't find that this has aged very well. The writing and subject were interesting, modern, and unusual. I can understand this in a kind of abstract way. This was listed 27th on the Modern Library 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. ![]()
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